Threads
AUSTIN IVERS 14 November 2020 - 6 February 2021
The Passing of a Shadow: Art and Entropy Joanne Laws is as an arts writer and editor based in County Roscommon. As soon as it was moonlight and that poor thing began to crawl and shake the pattern, I got up and ran to help her. I pulled and she shook, I shook and she pulled, and before morning we had peeled off yards of that paper. A strip about as high as my head and half around the room…1 Consider the scene as a young woman emerges from the wallpaper. She stands there, inconspicuous, statue-like and nude, aside from the faint papery shroud that enfolds her. Francesca was prone to concealing herself among the fixtures. Photographing herself obsessively during her short lifetime, she documented a ‘continuous performance’ in which she inhabited the stark architectural features of derelict buildings.2 Doorways, window frames, corners and fireplaces became hiding places, escape hatches or places in which to linger, lodge and contort. She orchestrated self-contained melodramas in these ruined places, the wild radiance of her soft contours refusing to conform to the sharp angles of her containment. In these enigmatic black-and-white images, the house appears as both prison and refuge. Her figure is gradually absorbed by the surroundings, as if she is anticipating her own disappearance. These experiments in self-eradication often involved long exposure times. The moving figure is obliterated, causing her transubstantiated flesh to vapourise in front of our eyes. The supernatural bodies featuring in these ‘ghost pictures’ are often transparent, out of focus, and neither present nor absent. At times, the show shutter speed causes a spectral light to emanate from the skin, in contrast to the darkness pooling around her. In this soul-state, she hovers at the threshold between worlds. Among the particles of white dust, we consider the erasure of precious things.
In other photographs, her figure is partially shrouded with layers of fabric or plastic sheeting. This impulse to conceal points to a desire to evade, subvert or redirect the male gaze, which traditionally dominates the art historical canon. On one occasion, she places a mirror between her legs, perhaps in denial of Gustave Courbet’s provocative painting, The Origin of the World (1866). While her body was her subject, recorded by the camera, some suggest that Francesca’s medium was actually time itself. Just as time punctuates the female body through cyclical and temporal experience,
My body, still too heavy with sleep to move, would endeavour to construe from the pattern of its tiredness the position of its various limbs, in order to deduce therefrom the direction of the wall, the location of the furniture, to piece together and give a name to the house in which it lay…3 Occasionally she dresses like the heroine of some nineteenth-century gothic novel, within more macabre scenes involving graveyards.
Francesca Woodman, Space 2, 1976
analogue photography is dependent upon the alchemical fusion of time and matter. Displaying a Proustian sensibility, the artist explores the interplay between past and present – between distant memory and the childhood unconscious. Leaping to her death, she discovered that the beauty of all past experience is eternally alive. The place became crater on each side, sank down to its first skull, shedding forests, oceans, dried bones and neons, as it fell through time like a forgotten pitted stone…4